About

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad

OzCLO is a volunteer run contest for high school students. It challenges them to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages. The program is designed for high school students from year 9 to year 12. Any secondary school student who enjoys the sample problems is a potential contestant.

OzCLO 2020 Competition

The dates of the OzCLO 2020 competition will be:

Regional round: Wednesday 4 March 2020

National round: Wednesday 25 March 2020

If you are interested in participating in the 2019 competition, ask your teacher to contact us!

Competition Format

The OzCLO contest is held in two rounds.

The First Round is a two hour competition, usually held in early March. Participants work in teams of four on a range of language analysis problems. The teams are usually selected by their schools. The competition is held at the school with teams submitting their answers through an online form. Some regions offer offline alternatives.

The National Round is by invitation to the top three teams for each region. This has the same format as the First Round but is held at a local host university. The National Round is usually held in late March.

The winners of the National Round are offered the opportunity of representing Australia at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO), which is usually held in late July or early August.

All participants complete the same tasks, with achievements recognised at the Junior level (years 9-10) and the Senior level (years 11-12).

Registration

Registration costs $10 per team. Depending on the time of the year, and various internal factors, registration is open in the months prior to a competition. If you require additional information you should contact your regional organisers.

Training

Training sessions for participants are held at some locations, and training materials are also available on the online competition website. We explain how the competition is run and give an overview of the fields of linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies. We also go over sample problems and give tips for solving them. If you would like to find out more about training sessions in each state, please email the local organisers.